Our best project to date                                                                                                                          -Me

The project path and plan was much like the last one. Milestones, Stepping stones, and go deeper, all that kind of stuff. Expect this project was nothing like my last User Manual project at.

What Was This Project?

All of our projects in PLP start with a driving question, this one’s was “How does what we hear, read, and see influence us”? The driving question is the main focus of this project, its not a yes or no answer, it takes much thought, consideration and a whole lot of research to find out.

We were split into groups, unlike the last project where we all worked individually. This wasn’t like normal group work though because each person had 4 different groups for 4 different reasons.

The North group was our Main groups the group where we worked to create an ad for our business. This group was the group that we brought back all of our knowledge and information from the others and all brought it together.

The East group was our photo and graphic design group. In this group we worked on  how to take photos and key elements in graphic design like fonts, colours, layout, and contrast. Really all the major design elements

The South group was our analysis group. We worked on milestone 1 with them but than noting else related to milestones. However, this group was mainly focused on our book, “The Gospel According to Larry”, (More on that later). We met with this group only once a week to discuss our thoughts on the book.

The West group was our advertisement group. Here we learned the persuasive techniques and appeals that advertisements use to capture our attention and make us interested in their product. This is where we gathered information on how create an ad that will appeal to our specific audience.

Launch 🚀

In our launch phase we did lots. Like our last project, we had to find out our need to knows, so we created a chart with three sections: Product, Process, and Content. We would put questions we had about the project and categorize them accordingly. We would eventually come back to these charts multiple times to check in on what we learned and any more questions we had about the project. We also studied how to analyze text by watching an ad created by apple promoting their Apple Home Pod. The ad was called Welcome Home and it’s 6 minutes long and directed by an amazing visual effects director, Spike Jonze. This ad was all visual representation and we had to find out what the message was. We wrote a paragraph on that for milestone one.

Building Knowledge 💡 

In the building knowledge phase, we learned how to create a perfect ad for our business. In a nutshell, we had to learn how the strategies professional marketing teams did it so that we could use them for our own ad. We learned lots in this phase hence the name “building knowledge”. We learned he 5 key media literacy questions and than took an advertisement and evaluated it. To create a great ad that our business would advertise we would have to find out how professional marketing teams create great ads. We learned how to take professional photos with our iPads,  We learned about media definitions, the media triangle, and media literacy. We also learned about demographics, advertising definitions and techniques and and appeals. We created multiple different drafts to

🔁 Develop and Critique

In our Develop and Critique stage, we started to make contact with our business via email. We had to work as a group to send in our best drafts to them so we could get there feed back and opinion. We than took their feedback and developed an ad around that. I felt confident in my final product, and that i put my best work into it. My first 3 or 4 drafts we’re almost identical,  as I felt that they were great. For my 4th draft I completely changed it as I received feedback that it was too busy and I tried instead advertising a product that would be perfect for the fall. I made it clean and simple, I also used an unfinished claim and a water is wet advertising technique that I learned in the building knowledge phase. These are all four of my drafts ⬇️

 

📢 Present and Reflect

In our Present and Reflect phase its the beginning of the end for our project. In this stage we share our final product with our group and combined them into one or two ads with aspects that we all liked (example: One persons background with another persons font and another persons layout) I liked this phase because we got to see everyone’s final product and share our own ideas and options on each other’s work. When I wrote this would’ve still been in the Present in reflect stage.

My final thoughts 💭

even though when I’m writing this i wont actually be finished the project, I felt that this was my personal favourite out of the two that we did in this first quarter. My entire world view and perspective has changed. When I look at ads now, I evaluate them and I’m able to figure out what the message is, who it’s targeting, what techniques and appeals it uses and how it’s presented. All in all I enjoyed this project a lot and it really let me play around with my creativity, whether it be taking photos, creating and ad, or looking at other ads. This entire Quarter was great and I’m super exited for the next PLP quarter!